


Just Too-Soon Enough

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Developing Relationship, Fluff, I guess that's my thing right now, M/M, Post-Canon, Romance, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:47:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24086098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Roy and his new adjutant (and even newer boyfriend) are visiting Briggs. It is very, very cold.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 51
Kudos: 691
Collections: RoyEd month





	Just Too-Soon Enough

**Author's Note:**

> I threw this nonsense together for [Roy/Ed Month](https://royed-month.tumblr.com/post/190840303323/hello-everyone-thank-you-all-for-waiting), Day 8, for the prompt "shivering"! Please go check out the prompt list and participate if you've got a mind to; the mods are awesome, and it's all super chill. You can contribute as much or as little as you fancy. Take a look! :D
> 
> This was done… very fast… during a week that was… not my favorite one… so… please be gentle, pff. It's yet another **several-years-post-Brotherhood-canon** , Ed-keeps-alchemy-and-automail-but-stays-in-the-military AU, because they're still my favorite! \o/

“You ever make promises to yourself?” Ed asks, chafing both hands up and down the opposite arms so fast that they very nearly blur. “Y’know, like… that you’re never gonna fuckin’ come back to a place that actively tried to kill you in more than seven different ways?”

Roy wants to put an arm around him. Both arms would be even better. Roy wants to wrap Ed right into the front of his coat and feel him nestle in and listen for that tiny sigh of contentment so soft and so honest that he probably doesn’t even realize he’s breathed it.

But they’re in the heart of ally-enemy territory, and Roy can’t risk it. He cannot, and _will_ not, let Olivier use Ed against him—or against himself. He won’t let her touch the strangest and truest and most beautiful thing in his life these days. She can’t have it. She can’t know.

This is still so new—startlingly bright and staggeringly big, yes; but delicate, in so many ways. Uncertain. They were what Roy considered fast friends—tightly-knit and terribly honest; ribbing each other easily but dropping into solemn confidences more smoothly still—for a long time before… this, but _this_ is uncharted. This is tentative yet.

“Is seven different ways the cutoff?” Roy asks, feigning disinterest. Ed will understand. Ed has grown remarkably understanding in the intervening years; Ed has wised up and calmed down so drastically that even with the steel arm on blinding display, Havoc did a double-take when he sauntered back into the office. Roy didn’t begrudge that reaction; in an unprecedented turn of fate, Ed had _knocked_ first.

Roy had dared to believe, then, that that was the most unthinkable thing that Ed was capable of.

He had been delightfully, deliciously, excruciatingly incorrect.

“It’s a start,” Ed is saying. “You gotta draw the line somewhere. I feel like ‘frostbite’, ‘automail malfunction’, ‘sheer fucking intimidation’, ‘giant icicles’, ‘prison coffee’, ‘a fucking tank’, ’hypothermia on top of your frostbite’, and ‘impalement’ is enough to make a call.”

“That was eight,” Roy says. So much for pretending not to pay attention.

Ed shoots him a grin that’s all crescent moon and blunted daggers. “See? This place hates me. It’s _science_.”

“Well,” Roy says, doing his respectable best to sound like a weary dilettante struggling to stay positive, “it’s only… for a week.”

“You say that,” Ed says, “like someone who’s never gotten hypothermia on top of your frostbite.”

“Is that even possible?” Roy asks.

Ed snickers at him openly, which will aid mightily in Roy’s ongoing quest to look incompetent. “Feel free to take a stroll outside and find out.”

  


* * *

  


Everything is better when they reach the safety of their room. Roy planted a few pointed questions in the right ears back home when Olivier had first volunteered _a_ room for Roy and his adjutant-in-training. Fortunately, by the sound of it, it’s because she thinks that Roy is a waste of space, not because she _knows_.

“What a dive,” Ed says, kicking at a leg on one of the beds with his metal foot and making an unsuccessful attempt to hide a grin. “Let’s never book at this shitty hotel again.”

“Absolutely not,” Roy says. “I’m going to write them a very strongly-worded letter decrying the state of their amenities.”

“Please phrase it exactly like that,” Ed says. “They’ll be ashamed _and_ confused.”

“That’s what I aspire to,” Roy says.

Ed flops down on his back on the bed and then makes a sound like a tormented cat. “ _Fuck_. Don’t do that. This thing’s like iron. It’s like Winry’s workbench, except harder, although at least it has fewer little nails and shit. I almost got tetanus one time. She felt bad.”

To say that most of Ed’s casual anecdotes verge on alarming would undersell the situation somewhat. “I… should hope.”

“It’s okay,” Ed says. “I got her dog hit by a train and all that.”

Roy reiterates the previous thought in his own head, but significantly louder. “You… what?”

“Never mind,” Ed says. “Shit, I’m _exhausted_ , but I’m too worked up to sleep. You know how that is?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

It occurs to him, as Ed shoots him an assessing look from the bed, that he has continued to stand three steps inside of the doorway for this entire conversation. Admittedly, there aren’t all that many steps to take in this room to begin with, but it still must register as hesitation.

And—it is, isn’t it? Despite having shed the significant weight of other people’s eyes and other people’s whispers, Roy still feels surrounded on all sides. He is fast discovering that ally-enemy territory is actually worse than enemy-enemy territory: at least you know when the enemies will try to stab you, i.e. all of the time. The allies wait until you let your guard down and then go for your throat.

Roy draws a very deep breath—which tingles in the bottoms of his lungs; he likes to imagine tiny snowflakes tickling his alveoli, which Ed will either find terrifically amusing or terrifically dumb—and tries to relax his shoulders by force. Olivier scheduled meetings on the day of their arrival on purpose. She wanted him to be on-edge and off-balance. She wanted her wall to pulverize as many of his as possible. She knows that she has the upper hand on her home turf; she knows that he has much more to lose.

But she underestimates him, like most people do. And she doesn’t have the slightest idea how much the things that he could lose have _given_ him.

He crosses over and sits down—gingerly—on the bed, directly next to where Ed has sprawled out on top of the blankets. It is, indeed, a travesty of a sleeping surface. Roy is disappointed but not surprised. He lays his gloved hand on Ed’s right knee, squeezes gently, and then leaves it there.

“That was a hell of a day,” he says.

“I don’t know how you do this shit all the time,” Ed says. “I could tell that you knew what she was really saying underneath the things she actually said, but… what a pain in the ass. Politics sucks.”

“Truer words rarely spoken,” Roy says. “It can be fun sometimes.”

Ed snorts. “Like when?”

“When you’re winning,” Roy says.

Ed snorts again, louder and more emphatically. “How often is that?”

“Aha,” Roy says. “Now you’ve reached the best part: at least half of the time that you’re winning, you can’t tell until it’s done.”

“You know,” Ed says, shifting his foot where he’s hiked his heel up against the bedframe until his thigh presses right against Roy’s—with quite a lot of woolen fabric in between, of course, but it still counts. It still counts a hell of a lot. “You could always quit and do something sensible with your life.”

Roy arches an eyebrow at him, rousting up one last roguish smile. “Such as?”

“Bullfighting,” Ed says. “Goat-wrangling. Competitive cross-country skiing. Or you could join the circus.”

Roy strokes his thumb across Ed’s kneecap, unsure if that will even register through all of the clothing but hoping that the gesture matters all the same. “As a clown, of course?”

Ed snickers. “Well, now that _you_ said it…” He shifts in a way that’s not quite a shrug. “Nah. I was gonna say that you could fake fire-swallowing with alchemy, but then I changed my mind. Obviously you’ve gotta be the ringleader. You’re already good at all that stuff—bein’ dramatic, swinging a cape around, telling everybody else what to do all the time.”

Ordinarily, Roy would swallow the smile in order to maximize the sarcasm, but he’s starting to understand the power of letting them through when he and Ed are alone. “I’m humbled,” he says, “to hear that my leadership talents have inspired you so much over the years.”

“I want you to write a book someday,” Ed says. “One where you transcribe all of the insults that people’ve tried to throw at you, and then you translate all of them into weird compliments in the next line down. _That’s_ a talent.”

“It’s been a very long time since I went to the circus,” Roy says. He is, to be more truthful, not entirely sure that he’s ever been—he has an extraordinarily vague childhood memory, which he keeps trying to cast back to; he thinks that there’s a shadowy segment where his father spills popcorn from a red-and-white-striped bag.

But it could very well be a sprout of cultural osmosis that has taken root in his mind and built a completely fictional recollection up around itself. He’d used to make up stories about the childhood that he’d _wanted_ to have, and over the years he’d dreamed about it often enough that now sometimes he can’t tell which is which.

“Me, too,” Ed is saying, contemplatively now. “Maybe we should focus your job hunt on something that we’ve got a little more experience with. Then again, the time that me and Al and Winry went, we spent a whole _day_ playing circus in Winry’s grandma’s yard after, so by Amestrian military standards, we’re pretty much experts.”

Roy resists the urge again and doesn’t hide the grin. “You may want to keep your voice down.”

“Fuck it,” Ed says. “You’ll come up with some bullshit reason why I was actually trying to say something nice.” A golden eye glimmers with that flame-curl amusement as it lights on Roy. “Won’t you?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

Ed grins right back up at him, wind-tangled braid coiled on the duvet. Roy has heard, before, that there is no satisfaction quite like having an animal that used to bite you stretch out beside you and bare its vitals because it trusts you, now, but _God_ —

“We tried to get the geese to be like the circus animals,” Ed says, “but they tried to attack us, which in retrospect is really not a surprise. And we tried to make a big circus tent by hanging sheets off the back porch, too.” This is much more charming and pastoral than most of Ed’s harrowing childhood stories; Roy can’t say that he doesn’t appreciate the break. “Then we tried to make the clothesline into a tightrope, and I fell off of it and almost broke my neck.”

Never mind.

“Oh,” Roy manages. “Oh, dear.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, warmly. It occurs to Roy that if the baseline of one’s youth is coming right up to the edge of losing _everything_ in a swell of light and violence, perhaps near-death experiences qualify as rosy nostalgia in comparison. “I think Pinako would’ve killed me if she hadn’t been so scared that I’d done it myself. But I was fine. Went all rag-doll on instinct and walked away with a couple bruises. I probably almost sent her into cardiac arrest, though, so it would’ve been a two-fer. You think it’s too late for an apology card?”

“Perhaps a phone call,” Roy says.

“You’re good at this shit,” Ed says. “Hey, Teacher always calls the military a circus anyway. So you have relevant job experience, too.”

Roy lets another sliver of the smile through. “I’m not sure whether to be touched at your confidence in my bullshitting skills or concerned that you seem to be trying to convince me to quit.”

Ed smirks at him. Ed, lying splayed out on a bed, leveling that particular expression like a challenge, is…

Tempting.

And terrifying, for that. Roy has founded his whole life on the reliability of his own restraint. Ed draws him right up to the precipice of his willpower some days.

“It’s pretty simple,” Ed says while Roy fights down yet another existential crisis related to the delicate balance of this undreamable reality. “If you quit doing this whole military thing, nobody’ll ever order you to go to Briggs again, and then we won’t have to be so goddamn _cold_.”

“But surely the circus will have to travel,” Roy says. “Inevitably we’d end up in North City at some point, and that’s nearly as bad.”

“Okay,” Ed says. “Circus was an ill-considered suggestion. Back to bullfighting. It’s practically the same word as what you already do.”

Roy taps a fingertip on Ed’s knee and arches an eyebrow. “Perhaps we should try to sleep on it before I make a career change that I regret.”

Ed sighs much more vigorously than Roy thinks it merits, but he knows exactly who would be blamed for modeling, once or twice upon a time, a penchant for melodrama in front of an impressionable youth.

“I think ‘try’ is gonna be the operative word,” Ed says.

“You are,” Roy says, “remarkably good at trying.”

Ed wrinkles his nose. “Have I ever told you that sometimes I like your weird compliments in spite of myself?”

Roy blinks. “I… no.”

“Good,” Ed says. He nudges his leg against Roy’s one more time before he swings himself up to sitting, and then to standing; and then he stretches both arms over his head until the left cracks and the right creaks. “Somehow I forgot _exactly_ how much I hate spendin’ the whole damn day on trains. We got a shower in this dump?”

He doesn’t wait for Roy’s response before crossing to the door that leads to the tiny adjoined bathroom—which is a plus, actually, since Roy will need to reserve as much of himself as humanly possible for not thinking in great detail about Ed in the shower.

  


* * *

  


Roy’s body wants sleep so badly that it has transcended from a craving to a _yearning_. His body pines. His body casts wistful glances in the direction of unconsciousness and then averts its face and softly sighs.

His brain, however, wants to run up and down the freezing halls, waving both arms over its head.

Attempting desperately to think circles around Olivier—who is not, by any stretch of the imagination, easy to keep ahead of, let alone to circumscribe—is one thing, and a significant thing in its own right.

Attempting equally desperately to keep his mind off of the fact that Ed is sleeping _in the same room_ , just one uncomfortable bed over, is another thing altogether.

Given the circumstances, it really shouldn’t qualify as some sort of intimacy milestone, but Roy can’t help probing at the corners of that prospect with a fingertip. Does it count as sharing a room if they’re _mostly_ here in a professional capacity, and they’re both trying to treat the relationship as a side-note? Left to his own devices, Roy wouldn’t have dared to undertake a mission with just the two of them so early on, but thus far it’s been… easy. When he focuses enough on the actual purpose of the enterprise that he forgets to tiptoe, he and Ed seem to end up stepping in perfect sync.

He supposes that neither of them usually favors the conventional approach towards… anything, really. Traditional milestones are all good and well, but it’s not as though they didn’t have their first fight seven and a half years ago; it’s not like they didn’t memorize each other’s weak spots—how to spear them, first; and then how to protect them fiercely—well before they learned each other’s laughs. It’s not like this was ever going to be ordinary.

Perhaps that’s why he’s hung up on the idea that it _could_ have been, at least in theory—that he and Ed could, in some hypothetical universe set at a tangent to their own, have made this courtship into the first normal thing that either of them has experienced in quite a while.

Well—omitting the detail that it officially began with Ed climbing up atop his desk, grabbing his lapels in both hands, and kissing him, immediately followed by Ed screaming “ _Fuck_!” at the ceiling and bolting out of the room so fast that they hardly saw anything but a flash of gold and blue.

Roy had weighed the option of calling Al, considered that Al would probably either laugh uproariously in his ear or come right out and tell him that it was his own fault, and instead gone hunting. He had found Ed in the depths of the library, where they’d had a hiss-whispered argument during which Ed had tried repeatedly to apologize and promise that he’d never do such a colossally stupid thing again for as long as he lived; and Roy had tried repeatedly to confess that he’d been harboring inconvenient feelings for longer than he wanted to admit.

Ed had then paused in the heedless backpedaling justifications just long enough to ask what about himself was so _inconvenient_. Roy—awash in adrenaline, shaken by the magnitude of his investment in all of this, unsettled by the immensity of this vulnerability—had fired back that the inconvenient part was primarily the difficulty of finding Ed in large crowds, where he completely disappeared, and you had to go around peering at people right at shoulder level, and it was really an extraordinary pain. Ed had stared, and then his face and crumpled up—first into a scowl, and then into helpless laughter, and then he’d covered it with both hands and started shaking his head. 

After a few seconds of dizzily attempting to determine where the ground was, and if the planet was still turning, Roy had pried Ed’s hands away and held one in each of his own and squeezed the steel one every bit as gently as the other and said something like “Funny enough, lately I think I quite like being inconvenienced,” and Ed had called him an idiot bastard liar thief and asked him if he wanted to get dinner sometime. Or even just dessert. Dessert was, evidently, “not a big commitment or anything—just, y’know, if you want.” Roy had suggested coffee; Ed had said “I’m stupid before coffee; you’d feel like you were talking to a brick wall”; Roy had mentioned his immense confidence that Ed had never once been stupid in his life, although perhaps impressively impulsive once or twice. Ed had snickered. A librarian had come over and loomed until they got the hint and scampered out a side exit, at which point it had seemed very logical to play hooky for the rest of the afternoon and go for ice cream after all. Ed had gotten a smudge of chocolate right on the tip of his nose. Roy had given in, and given up, and given over.

That was two and a half weeks ago.

All in all, he’d expected to have quite a bit more time to build bridges and map out boundaries before something like… this. But Olivier had summoned them immediately and without preamble, while Riza is off on some extremely overdue leave, which has left the rest of them scrambling to start with. Everyone knows that Olivier tends to get what she wants.

Evidently, right now, what she wants is for her pair of not-exactly-guests to _suffer_.

It has been a very long time indeed since Roy entertained notions of setting his own bed on fire for warmth. At least, in this case, the property damage would serve a secondary purpose of spiting the very person who has condemned them to this.

He stifles a sigh in the nick of time—which is what alerts him to the fact that the silence which he feared breaking is not, in fact, _silence_ at all.

There is a very soft, mostly muffled little… clatter-like noise.

Roy blinks up at the dark. Then he blinks again. Then he rolls over onto his side.

“Ed?” he ventures, as softly as he dares.

“ _Shit_ ,” Ed says, so vehemently that Roy startles the rest of the way awake—but then he hears it again.

Now he has little choice but to ask outright: “Are your teeth chattering?”

“ _No_ ,” Ed says. A pause. A rustle; a creak of springs; a noise more like grinding of teeth this time. “Maybe. Shit. I mean—I didn’t—I was trying not to wake you up.”

“You didn’t,” Roy says, sitting up now and resisting the urge to hold a hand to his head. “It’s like you said. Too wired.”

“Then I’m not sorry,” Ed says, despite the fact that he never apologized in the first place. “It’s fine. Go back to sleep. Or go back to trying to sleep, and do a better job this time. It’s my own damn fault. I was thinking about—well, I _wasn’t_ thinking when I got in the stupid shower, is the point, and I got my hair wet, and… and she must _hate_ you. They’re perfectly capable of keeping rooms at a reasonable temperature; their med bay’s great. She must’ve put us here on purpose.”

“Very likely,” Roy says. “Do you want me t—”

“Then again,” Ed says—which is good, actually, because Roy’s mouth had moved ahead of his brain, and he’s only just now coherent enough to reconsider what he might have offered; “if she wanted you _dead_ , you’d probably already be dead. She’s… efficient.”

Roy doesn’t like the sound of that, but this doesn’t seem like the time to press the issue.

“I suspect that she grudgingly respects me,” he says instead, “with all possible emphasis on the grudge. This strikes me as exactly the sort of almost-harmless vengeance that she thinks I deserve. I’m just sorry that you got caught in the crossfire.”

“It’s fine,” Ed says again, as if they haven’t discussed the not-so-small matter of his _teeth chattering_ ; and as if Roy’s eyes, adjusting to the very dim light from the crack beneath the door, can’t make out the fact that the Ed-shaped lump in the bed opposite is shivering violently to boot. “I just run kinda cold because of the automail and everything. Reduced body mass. And then I went and got my goddamn hair wet, like some kind of _idiot_ who doesn’t understand the _first_ fucking thing about _thermodynamics_.”

“It’s not you that she’s after,” Roy says, since he’s certainly still not coherent enough to talk thermodynamics with the likes of Edward Elric at some godawful hour in the heart of Briggs. “It’s possible that I could get you transferred to a warmer room.”

Apparently he’s still not coherent enough to talk about anything with the likes of Edward Elric, because the incredulous stare he receives is so intense that he can _sense_ it in the dark.

“I’m so fired,” Ed says.

That was… not, precisely, what Roy expected to come of the incredulous stare that he was intuiting. “Ah… not to my knowledge, you’re not. Which wouldn’t ordinarily be a sticking point, but considering that I am, at least on paper, your employer—”

“You’re not gonna fire me,” Ed says, calmly, and it’s true, and Roy wilts a bit in spite of himself. “Lieutenant Hawkeye is. Because you somehow went and banged your head up so good that you’re no longer makin’ any damn sense—on _my_ watch. I’m the worst adjutant in the recorded history of the Amestrian military. Probably in all _time_.”

“Trust me,” Roy says. “You are most assuredly not. And I didn’t hit—”

“It’s fine,” Ed says yet again. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll just… warm up.”

Roy pauses. “By force of will?”

“Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve done that way,” Ed says. “Or the least physically plausible.”

“Conceded,” Roy says. “But there… is…” He is an _adult_ , damn it. “There’s a much more expedient solution.”

The silence speaks several volumes of the heftiness that Ed usually favors in his books.

Then Ed says. “Well—yeah, but… you…”

This silence is much less communicative, and Roy catches himself squinting into the darkness.

“What about me?” he manages.

Ed says “Fuck’s sake” more quietly than Roy has ever heard him iterate an expletive. Ed usually takes such utter brazen pleasure in them that it’s remarkably rare to hear the word in such a small fraction of his voice.

Before Roy can formulate a way to ask if he’s all right, or at least no less all right than he was previously, there are additional rustling noises, followed by a distinct _fwip_ that might just be bedclothes tossed aside in the process of opening a space in the bed for someone else.

Roy blinks into the dark and listens to his heartbeat in his ears.

“Hurry up,” Ed says. “It’s fucking _freezing_.”

Roy blinks a little more, which obviously doesn’t help much, but it was worth a shot. Somehow, the last thing that he expected was for Ed to come right out and demand precisely the thing that he’d planned to wheedle his way around to suggesting. He’d assumed that there would be a _lot_ more cajoling. He’d strangely almost been looking forward to it.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Sure I don’t wanna get hypothermia on top of my frostbite?” Ed says. “Gee, lemme think.”

Roy pauses for just one more second, avidly attempting to determine if this is real, and then climbs down off of his bed carefully and gathers up all of his blankets. The floor is bitingly cold even through two pairs of socks, which favors the reality theory somewhat. He’s had enough dreams influenced by the conditions of reality, however, that he’s not quite ready to rule it out.

He shuffles cautiously until he collides with the side of another mattress. He hikes a knee up for leverage.

“Wait,” Ed says.

A part of Roy knows that his heart is the best thing about him—perhaps the only thing that can even come close to redeeming the vicious instincts and the cunning intellect. He knows that the way that he cares—deeply, sincerely, profoundly—about people, particularly and in the abstract, is far and away his most admirable trait, if he’s allowed to count any of those. He knows that his heart is the warmest part of him.

But at times like this, he wants to rip it out and be rid of it.

“Sorry,” he says breezily. “I—”

“Are _you_ sure?” Ed says, from very, very close. “Al says I snore.”

Roy swallows.

He breathes in and out again.

“Al has to say that,” Roy says. “He’s your brother. It’s in the contract.”

The thoughtful silence feels significantly longer when Roy still has one foot on the excruciatingly cold floor.

“Huh,” Ed says. “That sounds like exactly what Al would say.”

They were both much younger than they are now when Roy first realized that listening closely to Al was the single simplest way to ease open a back door to Ed’s thoughts and listen through the crack.

“I’m not quite sure if that’s a good thing in this case,” Roy says.

“Me neither,” Ed says. “Fuck it; it’s _cold_ , Mustang. Get the hell in here.”

Roy has to be told twice, apparently, but he doesn’t think three is necessary: he flings the blankets borrowed from his previous bed over the top of this one to the best of his ability in the dark, and then he settles a hand on the mattress so that he won’t fling himself directly into enormous peril. He doesn’t think that either of them would enjoy having his full weight land on one of Ed’s elbows. Neither elbow sounds appealing, although if Roy had to pick, he thinks the metal one would likely hurt a lot more.

He’s been generous in referring to the objects in this room as beds: ‘glorified cots’ is somewhat closer to the truth. The frame of this one squeals under their combined weight, and for a heart-stopping second, he thinks that it will cave, but then—

But then he’s settled, and the whole structure remains intact, and he even manages to pull some of the blankets over himself to enclose them both underneath the mound.

“Hmm,” Ed says.

Roy can hear that he rolled over to face the wall as Roy was climbing in, and isn’t sure what to make of that just yet. “Is that… all right?”

He’s using _that_ in about the most general capacity possible for the word, since even he’s not completely sure what he’s referring to, other than the situation on the whole. He intends for it to encompass his presence, and the gift of extra blankets that he brought, and the amount of surface area on the glorified cot that he’s now occupying, and the sound of his breathing, and the way that his weight will slightly tilt the mediocre mattress, and the overall imposition on Ed’s personal and psychological space. It’s quite a lot to ask from a four-letter pronoun so late at night.

“No,” Ed mumbles, and Roy goes as still as he can again, feverishly trying to determine where he might move to take up less space or stop intruding or— “It’s still as cold as a snowman’s balls, so—”

“Is that a charming Eastern idiom that I missed?” Roy asks before he can help himself. “Or did the Elric household make anatomically accurate snowpeople?”

Both are quite plausible. That’s the scary part.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Ed mutters. Before Roy can remember why his whole body is tense and his head is spinning, the bed dips, and then…

And then Ed’s back presses up against his chest, and Ed’s head fits just beneath his jaw, and Ed’s be-socked heels graze his shins, and he can’t even remember an era when he could speak.

“Shit,” Ed says, but the fact that he’s practically purring softens the expletive quite a bit. “You’re so _warm_.”

“I believe,” Roy chokes out, ironing it as it leaves his mouth so that it sounds moderately composed, “that I’m ordinary amounts of warm.”

“I’m endothermic,” Ed says. “It’s a pain in the ass. You should be glad I’ve got clothes on.”

Roy is. And isn’t. And _is_.

“The automail’s a mother _fucker_ when the metal gets cold,” Ed says. “Even this alloy can get pretty nasty; the regular one’s worse. I dunno if I ever told you this—right at the start after we got his body back, Al’s physical therapist made him take up a manual dexterity hobby to get his fingers back into shape, and he picked knitting _specifically_ so that he could make me automail sheaths that look like potholders.”

“I don’t believe you told me that,” Roy says, “but I have almost never had less trouble believing something in my life.”

He can hear the grin in Ed’s voice. That… tingles. Pleasantly—like soda bubbles. “He’s really fast now. He says he likes it, but I think what he really likes is sittin’ in the rocking chair and knitting and starting sentences with ‘Back in the good old days’.”

“I believe that, too,” Roy says.

“Shit,” Ed says, for the umpteenth time tonight. “If I’d known you’d get this tractable if I started datin’ your ass, I would’ve done it years ago.”

Roy feigns offended as well as he possible when he doesn’t dare to move so that he can clap a hand over his heart. “Without my consent?”

“Obviously,” Ed says. “I probably would’ve just sent you an interoffice memo that said ‘Hey, we’re dating now’, ’cause you never read them, but you won’t admit it.”

“I read _some_ of them,” Roy says. “I happen to consider it an unprecedented universal injustice that I’m expected to read so many boring memos over the course of the average day. Why do I even pay employees if not for them to read the worst ones for me, and then summarize the content in a more palatable format?”

Ed snorts. “Such as?”

“Expressive pantomime,” Roy says. “Semaphore. Interpretive dance.”

“I’m gonna need a raise for that,” Ed says.

“And a promotion,” Roy says. “I’ll have a new position added into the military hierarchy—Chief Memo Summarizing Officer and Interpretive Dance Supervising Choreographer. We may need to abbreviate it. But at least life will be wonderful for all of us at last.”

“Uh huh,” Ed says. “You know what would make life a little more wonderful right now?”

Roy expects something along the lines of _Making Al the official Office Animal Handler since he’s around so much anyway_ , which Roy has… thought about. Just once. Or twice. Two and a half times at a maximum. “Do tell.”

Instead of lamenting the emptiness of the unofficial tip jar that they’ve started for Al in a coffee mug with a broken handle, however, Ed wriggles in a little closer against Roy, which is—

Which is a very, very different matter.

“If I wasn’t still fuckin’ _cold_ ,” Ed says.

A somewhat ominous creak stills both of them at once.

“Oh,” Ed says. “We’re… are we right up against the edge?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

“Shit,” Ed says. “I don’t get this whole bed-sharing thing. Al’s so used to taking up too much space that he always curls himself into a little ball, and I have to go poking around in the bed to make sure he’s even there.”

Roy opens his mouth to ask why Al is curling up into unobtrusive shapes in Ed’s bed in the first place, then remembers firstly the sheer severity of the atrophy when Ed had brought him back from the Gate; and secondly the relevant fact that the Elrics never play by anyone else’s rules. Al is also very likely trying to get Ed accustomed to the idea of a cat without ever alerting him to the scheme.

Roy doesn’t have much of an opportunity to speak anyway, since Ed immediately shifts towards the wall, opening up a space behind himself and greatly reducing the likelihood of Roy tipping out of the cold bed and ending up on the even-colder floor.

He scoots forward into the not-especially-warm spot that Ed left behind. He considers his options. He raises his arm and very, very tentatively grazes his fingertips against Ed’s back for permission.

“May I—”

“ _Yes_ already,” Ed says, reaching up with the sock-swathed metal hand and drawing Roy’s arm in around him. “Jeez, and people say that _I_ can’t take a hint.”

Roy’s blood is singing. His brain is mush. He switches to autopilot and sits back to revel in this ride for as long as it lasts. “Who says that?”

“You,” Ed says. “And Al. And Winry. And pretty much everyone who’s ever met me. And the next time someone does, I’m gonna tell them _Roy_ fucking _Mustang_ can’t take a hint either, so I clearly just learned from the best.”

“You’re too kind,” Roy says. Ed is clutching Roy’s arm to his chest. Roy can feel Ed’s heartbeat—directly underneath his own pulse in his wrist. That shouldn’t seem so… 

“You’re giving me more evidence,” Ed says.

Significant. Balanced. Right.

“I thought it would be kind of me in return,” Roy says. “Equivalent exchange.”

“Eugh,” Ed says.

Roy kisses the back of his head.

“ _Eugh_ ,” Ed says. “Shit, that’s disgusting. Do it again.”

Roy laughs until Ed kicks him—gently—with the automail foot.


End file.
